I read the complete step by step how to on setting up dual booting windows 7 and xp. I prepared all my partitions beforehand, and labeled them accordingly so there would be no confusion i. I installed windows 7 on my new SATA drive. Everything went OK, except that I never got a boot menu presented - to 7, it was as if XP was not there i.
I downloaded and installed, and ran, easybcd, and tried to add the xp menu entry manually. It asks for the drive, and the drive with xp on it is now, under windows 7, drive D (it is E when I boot xp). All necessary files (ntldr, ntdetect.com, boot.ini) are all on this drive. But when I try that menu entry, all the computer does is reboot. It will still only boot windows 7, unless I go into the BIOS settings and change the boot order of the hard drives (in this list, if I make the one with the Win7 partition nr 1, I can boot windows 7 and only that; if I make the one with the XP partition nr 1, I get my regular old boot menu from boot.ini (which also gets me into my wubi install of ubuntu). i
I would like to be able to boot into XP from the windows 7 boot menu, or, alternately, would like to boot windows 7 from the xp boot menu. (that would be even better). Does anyone have any pointers for me?

Best way to have stupid Windows7 on a dual boot system, is no windows. You will get lucky by using Ubuntu and Mountain Lion instead...! ;-)

Nevertheless, it sounds like You are in a real mess, because Win7 just reserves the boot priority anyway. I dont know why, sometimes new Win7 on dual boot systems behaves like a Submarine, You will be aware of the desaster by opening a window.

To solve the problem You should setup dual boot system in following order:

If you use the dual (multi) boot feature built into XP or Windows 7 to dual boot with, by default, ALL the System Restore restore points in Windows 7 are DELETED, EVERY TIME you boot XP. If this concerns, there is only one solution to solve situation by using MicroSoft BitLocker feature, but that's only available to you if you have the Ultimate or Business version of Windows 7. BitLocker is installed on a secret 20 GB partition wich will be installed during Win7 setup

- It doesn't matter if Windows 7 or XP is "primary" or "secondary". You can only boot one of them on bootup at time.

- So run Windows7 Setup at first within all neccassery system drivers by device manufactors or whql-drivers and disable automatic drivermanagement to satisfact future use of the system.

- Since XP Setup will fuck up Win7 MBR You have to save the MBR to a USB-Device

Afterwards install XP to a fresh partition, not altering it or creating a new one, then restore the MBR from the backup. This would leave the dualboot exactly as it is now, except that XP will start up now because it's a new install.

If you want to go this route it's very important to first mark the XP partition as active and the 7 partition as inactive. Then boot from the XP setup disc and perform the install, taking care to overwrite the correct partition.

After that, you would then set the 7 partition active and the XP partition inactive again - it doesn't matter if you do this before or after reverting the MBR.